Ex-gang member steers kids from crime

Message spread in schools, on streets

Published 10:00 pm, Monday, July 21, 2003

TACOMA -- Twenty years ago, when Lawrence Stone ran with the Bloods, he sold drugs because that's where the money was.

"I made $1,000 in an hour one day, selling crack cocaine," Stone recalls. "The attraction for me was it gave me a sense of identity. And power."

Before he got into the thick of things, he never imagined he'd be stabbed 13 times, shot and sent to prison.

When he got out, he decided he wanted to try to steer kids away from gang life and crime.

Now he runs a one-man mentoring program called the Big Homie Project, funded by private grant money from the Eastside Lutheran Mission, where he goes to church. The three-year grant runs out next year.

He visits Tacoma schools and walks the streets, talking to boys coming of age. He doesn't like to go into much detail about the gang life he left behind.

"It's not something you boast about," he says. "I don't wear it like a badge. But the guys who play the game, they know who I am."

Stone was traveling up and down the West Coast selling cocaine six years ago, when he was caught and sent to prison for nearly 2 1/2 years in California. His wife and mother followed him to California so they could see him while he was behind bars, but his wife eventually left him.

While in prison, he learned a lot from inmates serving life sentences. "I had a revelation from God," he says. "I figured I was better than that environment."

Much had changed by the time Stone returned to Tacoma in 2000. Some of his old gang members were gone.

Others had married or gone to college, and the remaining gangs were being run by younger men with much less to lose.